The Mozilla Foundation has recently launched the latest version of their Firefox web browser. The foxiest web browser around, which lets you access all of those amazing websites (like TPU) now features increased support for multitasking through its multi-process technology. A result of the Electrolysis effort from Mozilla's part, which has spawned more than eight years of work, Firefox 54 applies the Goldilocks principle to browser design, straddling an approach between increased performance and acceptable memory usage.

As such, Firefox won't be like Chrome, where each process is responsible for a single tab and its content handling (and can therefore increase memory usage immensely, which has justified Chrome's fame as a memory hog), but will instead opt for a more streamlined approach. Open 10 different tabs with 10 sites in Chrome, and you'll have 10 different processes. Each of those processes has its own memory - with their own instance of the browser's engine. Au contraire, Firefox now creates up to 4 separate processes for web page content. This means that the first 4 tabs each use those 4 processes, and additional tabs run using threads within those processes, optimizing, as per Firefox, memory usage and performance.

This also means that up to a point (well, up to 4 tabs), Firefox will now be more stable should one of the tabs (and processes) fail, since they are virtually separated from the other tabs. However, should you have more than 4 tabs open, a failing tab could result in a cascading event for the other tabs open under that same process. Firefox is adding the option for users to increase the number of processes Firefox can start on the browser settings though, so if you have more than 8 GB of system RAM (the amount that Firefox is looking towards optimizing with this change), you can increase them at the expense of increased memory consumption.

If only they also fixed their dumb ass retarded GPU blocklist which makes Firefox USELESS on my AMD E-450. But works absolutely flawless in Chrome or Opera which also use the same dumb GPU block list, but here, at least I can ignore it. And I haven't had a single crash, freeze or lockup. But they still keep on blocking the GPU for no fucking reason. God this is infuriating. And trying to contact them to unblock the damn thing is literally like writing a letter and then throwing it in a god damn black hole. All this fancy multi process stuff is useless if everything that should be running on GPU is hammering a CPU. Mozilla is so stupid recently I can't even describe it.

Opera that I'm using now has its share of dumb stuff as well, but at least not as severe as in Firefox.

That one graph, says Firefox-64 must be old or something or whoever made graph is too effin lazy to call it Waterfox. Now if that particular graph was made by someone at Mozilla, he/she is prolly still holds a grudge. :kookoo::D

DeathtoGnomes said:That one graph, says Firefox-64 must be old or something or whoever made graph is too effin lazy to call it Waterfox. Now if that particular graph was made by someone at Mozilla, he/she is prolly still holds a grudge. :kookoo::D

Unsure if you're trying to be sarcastic or what. Firefox-64 has been out for a bit.

For me any version from 50.x.x is useless since they drop (the crappy and shitty) Java support. Because I have a lot of web based Management tools at work that require this p.o.s. Java, I am forced to use Firefox 52 ESR for now. Hopefully they will upgrade this to have similar features as 54 version.

Version 53 works better or facebook is just a system hog. memory hits 100k when watching videos on that site or just browsing for a long period of time. I use vk more than fb, never have that problem. hmmmmm

DeathtoGnomes said:Mozilla stopped developing and dropped the official version of Firefox-64 a few years ago, and made it open source. its now called Waterfox.

EDIT: just found this about FF64, with a few limitations it says. Ok FF64 is almost an exact duplicate of Waterfox even uses the same exact addons paths

Technically, it's the other way around. Mozilla has maintained the 64-bit path since the dawn of time, just not made an official, compiled release until recently. Waterfox's claim to fame is chiefly performance by using some extended instructions (sse2 is the highest mozilla uses). That is Waterfox's contribution, not the amd64 codepath itself.

R-T-B said:Technically, it's the other way around. Mozilla has maintained the 64-bit path since the dawn of time, just not made an official, compiled release until recently. Waterfox's claim to fame is chiefly performance by using some extended instructions (sse2 is the highest mozilla uses). That is Waterfox's contribution, not the amd64 codepath itself.

Mozilla officially stopped 64bit support around the same time when Waterfox launched, prolly just coincidental, but I had read many mixed stories and rumors. FF64 was not maintained, it may have put on the shelf, but there was nothing 64bit from mozilla for years. The blog states its a release of FF64 in 2015, which makes no sense since FF64 was around long before that. The main reason I went to WF was that FF64 was discontinued, think I had vista u64 back then.

Mozilla officially stopped 64bit support around the same time when Waterfox launched, prolly just coincidental, but I had read many mixed stories and rumors. FF64 was not maintained, it may have put on the shelf, but there was nothing 64bit from mozilla for years.

There were always nightlies, but they were development snapshots naturally.

nah eff you firefox.... you burned bridges with that canning the director bc he didn't pander to your narrative.. Slimjet is where it's at right now... UI and power of FF and less bloat, but the awesome chrome rendering engine.. Also slimjet has way more built in and is more secure.... Firefox is dead thanks to hipster devs and their virtue signalling over making it not crash all the time.

RejZoR said:If only they also fixed their dumb ass retarded GPU blocklist which makes Firefox USELESS on my AMD E-450. But works absolutely flawless in Chrome or Opera which also use the same dumb GPU block list, but here, at least I can ignore it. And I haven't had a single crash, freeze or lockup. But they still keep on blocking the GPU for no fucking reason. God this is infuriating. And trying to contact them to unblock the damn thing is literally like writing a letter and then throwing it in a god damn black hole. All this fancy multi process stuff is useless if everything that should be running on GPU is hammering a CPU. Mozilla is so stupid recently I can't even describe it.

Opera that I'm using now has its share of dumb stuff as well, but at least not as severe as in Firefox.

Prima.Vera said:For me any version from 50.x.x is useless since they drop (the crappy and shitty) Java support. Because I have a lot of web based Management tools at work that require this p.o.s. Java, I am forced to use Firefox 52 ESR for now. Hopefully they will upgrade this to have similar features as 54 version.

use another NPAPI enabled browser only for your java tools, why do you have to stay within the main FF?

DeathtoGnomes said:Mozilla officially stopped 64bit support around the same time when Waterfox launched, prolly just coincidental, but I had read many mixed stories and rumors. FF64 was not maintained, it may have put on the shelf, but there was nothing 64bit from mozilla for years. The blog states its a release of FF64 in 2015, which makes no sense since FF64 was around long before that. The main reason I went to WF was that FF64 was discontinued, think I had vista u64 back then.

notice osx & linux dont even have 32bit in the charts, it's only windows that dragged on 32bit (probably since windows easily runs 32bit apps on a 64bit system)

remixedcat said:nah eff you firefox.... you burned bridges with that canning the director bc he didn't pander to your narrative.. Slimjet is where it's at right now... UI and power of FF and less bloat, but the awesome chrome rendering engine.. Also slimjet has way more built in and is more secure.... Firefox is dead thanks to hipster devs and their virtue signalling over making it not crash all the time.

it's called blink rendering engine, not chrome, which isnt even the primary codebase, that's chromium...

so slimjet is not open source? made in america? not available outside windows? claims to block ALL ads even though an ad can be a simple image tag? a proper ad blocker needs to be user customizable to add newly needed blocks... further, slim doesnt make any effort for anyone to trust them with their generic site compared to vivaldi (people from classic opera) or brave (known security people)

re·tard·ed/rəˈtärdəd/
adjective
less advanced in mental, physical, or social development than is usual for one's age.

DeathtoGnomes said:No, there wasnt anything for a long long time. Even if there was, Mozilla stop posting about anything related for a long time.

They literally built nightlies. They don't post about them because they weren't supported. I guess this is techincally a disputable point because I don't even think they were branded "firefox" but they shared the same codebase.

@kn00tcn
Yes, I've tried all the settings that allegedly ignore the block list and it does jack shit. Youtube was still totally unplayable because it was running on CPU instead of GPU. But in Opera and Chrome, all I have to do is flip ONE setting and everything changes. I've requiested countless times for Mozilla to unblock AMD E-450 because it works flawlessly without ANY crashes or problems and they just ignore me. Filled a Bugzilla report for non-functional GPU blocklist ignoring controls and it has been like 2 months and no one bothered to respond. So I said fuck you and went to competition. Chrome was shit so I ditched it because you need 30 extensions just to make the damn browser half functional. Opera needs like 4 extensions because it has the rest already integrated (adblock, mouse gestures, bookmarks access sidebar etc). I know it's Chinese owned, but it's still coded by Norwegians. Besides, we already fucked our privacy years ago when we started using webmails like GMail and services like Google Search, so who really cares at this point. I just wanted a browser that serves me. And browser that intentionally blocks GPU acceleration for no damn good reason doesn't serve me. So it had to go. This multi-process thing sounds interesting, but it's essentially useless for me because of the GPU thing. And I need same browser on all my systems to have bookmarks and stuff in sync.

R-T-B said:They literally built nightlies. They don't post about them because they weren't supported. I guess this is techincally a disputable point because I don't even think they were branded "firefox" but they shared the same codebase.

That looks more like a press release schedule and planner. :rolleyes: Not much information of anything else either, so where is the schedule of nightlies dating back to 2004?2005? (I forget when it became a thing). FF64/WF is open source so ya lots of the code is shared. I like that they are interchangeable. WF recently stopped send telemetry back to mozilla, not like mozilla cared about that anyway, lol.

DeathtoGnomes said:Mozilla stopped developing and dropped the official version of Firefox-64 a few years ago, and made it open source. its now called Waterfox.

EDIT: just found this about FF64, with a few limitations it says. Ok FF64 is almost an exact duplicate of Waterfox even uses the same exact addons paths

What are you talking about ? Mozilla completed work on Firefox 64bit several months ago and is it now fully supported version across all channels and languages including stable channel. Moreover there is going to be a 32bit to 64bit users automigration very soon.
You can download whatever version you can https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/
Waterfox is Firefox's spin-off which has nothing to do with Mozilla.

Yeah but the standard download for Firefox is still the 32-bit version, it's like the 64-bit version is looked upon as the red-headed stepchild. When you download Firefox it really downloads a shim downloader, if that shim downloader were to download the 64-bit version but default for 64-bit operating systems it would be OK but it doesn't.

Src said:What are you talking about ? Mozilla completed work on Firefox 64bit several months ago and is it now fully supported version across all channels and languages including stable channel. Moreover there is going to be a 32bit to 64bit users automigration very soon.
You can download whatever version you can https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/
Waterfox is Firefox's spin-off which has nothing to do with Mozilla.

great! auto migration is news to me. But either you werent around when Mozilla dropped FF64 the first time or you were still using IE9. :banghead: